Fox News host Jessie Watters channels Warren Farrell (and NWOslave) with inane comments on the government as a substitute husband

Fox News host Jessie Watters: seemed to be channeling Warren Farrell with some particularly obtuse remarks he made recently on the Fox show “Outnumbered” on the “single ladies” vote.

Hillary Clinton needs the single ladies vote. I call them ‘The Beyoncé Voters’ — the single ladies. Obama won single ladies by 76% last time, and made up about a quarter of the electorate. They depend on government because they’re not depending on their husbands. They need contraception, health care, and they love to talk about equal pay.

If we ignore the implicit racism of his castigating “Beyonce voters” for being welfare “takers,” Watters is more or less rehashing an old, bad argument that Farrell made in The Myth of Male Power. In a section of the book called “Government as Substitute Husband,” Farrell wrote that “when divorces left women without husband-as-savior, many women looked for substitute saviors … .”

While New Age women turned to gurus and traditional women turned to God the Father or his alleged earthly representatives, Farrell wrote, feminist women either opted

to save themselves or to turn to the biggest savior of all – government as substitute husband. … Divorces led bodies of men (called legislatures) protecting women collectively as other men (called husbands) failed to protest women individually. This meant raising taxes mostly on other men to provide money mostly for women. When divorces deprive women of husbands to protect them, then, our collective unconscious still wants to protect women.

Farrell attempted to hand-wave away the inconvenient fact that the overwhelming majority of those running the government are men by suggesting that

a legislator is to the voter what a chauffeur is to the employer – both look like they’re in charge but both can be fired if they don’t go where they’re told.

So apparently the “chauffeurs” in government are completely at the mercy of women voters, since women make up a small majority of voters.

Given how laughably simplistic – and just plain wrong — this argument is, it’s kind of astounding to think that Farrell has a degree in Political Science.

Farrell’s “Big Daddy” government theory was also popular with one of this blog’s most prolific trolls, a fellow calling himself NWOSlave. Some sample comments (each paragraph is from a different comment of his; click on them for links).

Why they think further alienating the voters they don’t have is going to net them more votes is baffling. Saying “We hate women and minorities sooooooo much” over and over isn’t going to make white dudes vote twice. And saying “yeah well, if you don’t vote for me, you’re a dumb” isn’t going to work nearly as well as, say, listening to a demographic and trying to meet it’s needs through policy.

It’s funny because after the 2012 elections the Republicans tried to figure out why they lost and actually came to the correct conclusions. That they’re alienating people of color (I think they’ve given up on black voters but they used to do OK with Hispanic voters), women who aren’t white + married, and young people. They decided they needed to do better at not being racist, sexist, and homophobic.

However, that would mean a complete overhaul of their policies and the way talk and it would involve pissing off the base so they’ve failed completely. They even held a summit on making the party more diverse in a former plantation. If anything they’ve doubled down on the racism.

As much as they claim there’s no war on women, I know they’re not going to be able to help themselves if Hilary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee. The misogyny will flow like wine. And yes, the MRAs and Fox News lovefest will grow.

My apologies for the thoughtlessness. My stupid pun wasn’t intended to have any connection to ‘misogynoir’ beyond the fact that the latter word made me realise that you could make new words by replacing the last syllable of ‘misogyny’ with a word beginning with ‘n’ (in itself hardly the most startling or original comedic revelation, I know), but I can see how it may have seemed as if I was mocking that word or its use.

Who are they calling “single ladies” anyhow? I’d guess the majority of ladies on birth control pills have chosen to do so because they are regularly sexually active with the same partner. But I guess that doesn’t fit the “sluts living it up on the government dime” narrative too well.

I realize I dumped all the statistics on this thread without much explanation, but it’s because I was attempting to highlight how much the Republicans rely on white men and women voters in the red states. They haven’t written off black voters, they’ve cast them as villains in order to gin up their base. Hence “Beyoncé voters” and Obama Derangement Syndrome. Fox New’s race baiting is out of control and the Fox Nation comment boards read like Stormfront at this point. Google “Moochelle Obama” if you want to feel great sorrow and rage.

Amusingly in the Republicans post-2012 autopsy, one of their main planned outreach to women was to appeal to married women of color, simply because they have pretty much have written off single women in most of the country. Of course, when Republicans say women of color they mean Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Asians.

I don’t see how they will attract Latino voters. The thing that’s tearing the Republicans apart is immigration, because the anti-immigration tea partiers are alienating the key growing demo of the future and demanding the party block any immigration reform. Back in the Reagan years conservatives thought the majority of Latinos would be Catholic, socially and fiscally conservative, and anti-black, aka Republican. Latinos were turned off by the awful things Romney said about undocumented immigrants during the Republican primaries and are pretty alienated at this point.

“So can we call Republican voters “Hunter Thompson voters” because they vote based on Fear and Loathing?’

I don’t know. I often feel that the urban middle class democrats does not really get what makes the rural blue collar conservatives tick. Which is in part why right wing radio talk show hosts and televangelists have more influence on them then Howard Zinn, Bill Maher and Chomsky combined. There is a clash of values that goes deeper than fear and loathing, imo. And there are few authors writing about it who know the culture from the inside. I can only think of Janisse Ray, Joe Bageant and Wendel Berry.

Well, he’s got a point – isn’t everybody sick of those so-called “Vaginal-Americans” sneaking over the borders and taking our jobs? And then going on welfare while taking our jobs after sneaking over our borders? And then trying to get abortions while going on welfare while taking our jobs after sneaking over our borders? Then working when they should be raising their kids after trying to get abortions while going on welfare while taking our jobs after sneaking over our borders?

Isabelle’s got a point. My upstate NY relatives, well, one in particular, enjoy mocking my college. All how if I have (most of) a psych degree, well I oughta be able to fix myself then!

College is a stupid waste of time, don’t need no college to milk a cow! Ok, mocking my least favorite relative that I ever have to actually put up aside, education? “They’ve” all fucked it up, this “new math” (wtf is with that one?) and how academia is a bunch of people full of hot air who don’t do anything. Raising the min wage would raise prices on everything and just out more people out of work (I dared argue that one, got told I know nothing because of my age…month of my 28th birthday)

It’s not just fear, or loathing, add some resentment (not jealously, not resentment that “city folk” have it easier or something, but resentment that “city folk” don’t want their way of life…and that’s if you’re white, middle class, male, cis, straight, Christian, etc…anything else and they might just resent that you exist), then add a dash of “book learning doesn’t teach you anything you need to know”, stir in some “I don’t need your gadgets”, and then garish with some hatred seeped in “how dare you think you’re better than me?!”

And then decide that dealing with my father is better than dealing with that and stay here for the fourth. Oh well, the cat would get lonely if I went with them anyways. (Yes, the grapes must be sour)

It feels like the US is becoming more and more polarized and ungovernable. The right wing simply refuses to accept the legitimacy of the opposition. Any time Democrats attain the Presidency, the right wing embarks on witch hunts, conspiracy theories, taxpayer-$-wasting investigations, and impeachment proceedings. Even though the investigations inevitably fail to turn up anything, they still have the effect of distracting the Democrats, forcing them to expend their resources and energy defending themselves against baseless accusations and less time enacting a progressive agenda. Then, come election time, Republicans can portray Democrats as weak and ineffectual because they didn’t accomplish anything during their term in office. Rinse, repeat.

The refusal to acknowledge Democrats as legitimate also explains a lot of the birther conspiracy theories. If Obama can be exposed as a fake/alien/not born in the US, then he isn’t technically President, and America still hasn’t had a black President, and all is well in Stormfront land. It must really piss them off that Obama got elected to a second term.

The red states are built specifically on the white religious right. There are plenty of rural blue collar conservative-leaning people in New England, but that’s also the least religious region in the US. Now that the Republicans have gone nuclear right, New England, and the Mid-Atlantic states, are rock solid blue. In the North East, our stupid conservatives are less annoying or simply outnumbered. It’s not bragging if it’s true.

I often feel that the urban middle class democrats does not really get what makes the rural blue collar conservatives tick. Which is in part why right wing radio talk show hosts and televangelists have more influence on them then Howard Zinn, Bill Maher and Chomsky combined. There is a clash of values that goes deeper than fear and loathing, imo.

I agree, Isabelle. I live in one of the reddest areas of my Southern state, and since I blend in – nicely dressed middle class white lady with a wedding ring and two kids – a lot of strangers like to give me their “just between us chickens” insights on the world. I hear appalling racism, bigotry, prejudice…and a lot of confusion. Hateful things come out of their mouths, but under it all they mostly feel attacked. Older folks in particular have spent their entire lives being told that their beliefs are good and godly and patriotic, and now in the span of a few short decades things have changed completely. It’s easier and comforting to listen to people who’ll tell you that you’re still right and the change-makers are evil, so that’s what they do. And as despicable as their ideas and voting records are, I do feel for these angry, bewildered people. They can’t keep up with the changing world, and they probably never will.

I save my hatred for the pundits, politicians and plutocrats who exploit that insecurity and turn it into fear and self-righteous anger. Their profit and political gain comes at the price of real dialogue and understanding; because if we listen to each other, we might learn to agree, and there’s nothing lucrative about that. If the U.S. falls into complete in-fighting chaos, the blood will be on their hands.

It was an attempt to make math more understandable. It suffered from a number of flaws.

1: It introduced elements of Set Theory; but failed to properly structure this, so that one was grouping dissimilar things, and using pictorial elements instead of numerical ones, ergo five oranges, plus a bundle of 10 sticks and one apple = 16.

2: Because it wasn’t presenting math in terms the childrens parents were familiar with they didn’t understand it, and so couldn’t help their parents.

3: It required teachers who really understood the material, which wasn’t the case with many of them.

The thing is, when properly taught, it was better than the extant curricula, but it wasn’t often taught properly. Improperly taught it was massively confusing.

So it has been used as a whipping boy to prove that teachers can’t be trusted to teach.

Raising the min wage would raise prices on everything and just out more people out of work (I dared argue that one, got told I know nothing because of my age…month of my 28th birthday)

Perhaps you could initiate a facebook meltdown if you circulated this article written by someone who …
1) favours raising the minimum wage
2) is a multi-billionaire
3) Is addressing these remarks to other multi-billionaires.

It’s long, but I love a couple of portions. This one’s from page 3. (Note when he says “you” he’s talking to the other 0.01%ers.)

Wal-Mart is our nation’s largest employer with some 1.4 million employees in the United States and more than $25 billion in pre-tax profit. So why are Wal-Mart employees the largest group of Medicaid recipients in many states? Wal-Mart could, say, pay each of its 1 million lowest-paid workers an extra $10,000 per year, raise them all out of poverty and enable them to, of all things, afford to shop at Wal-Mart. Not only would this also save us all the expense of the food stamps, Medicaid and rent assistance that they currently require, but Wal-Mart would still earn more than $15 billion pre-tax per year. …

We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.

… You know the truth even if you won’t admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we’d be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It’s not that Somalia and Congo don’t have good entrepreneurs. It’s just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that’s all their customers can afford.

@Flying Mouse
I save my hatred for the pundits, politicians and plutocrats who exploit that insecurity and turn it into fear and self-righteous anger. Their profit and political gain comes at the price of real dialogue and understanding; because if we listen to each other, we might learn to agree, and there’s nothing lucrative about that.
^that
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(‘.’)
(“)(“)

I see a lot about how disdainful and anti-intellectual rural Americans are, everywhere really, but it goes both ways. The more urbanized a region, the more the people look down their noses at the folks in the sticks; one only has to listen to hipsters cruelly mocking everything that rural people enjoy to know that. I’m not sure why it comes as a surprise when the hillbillies reciprocate the feeling.

Now, rural Americans are overwhelmingly white, and racism is pretty rampant, and a good portion of their animus toward the cities is born of racism. So it’s really easy to dismiss them as backwards. White people in the city, however, don’t have a lot of stones to throw on the racism front, and self-satisfied snobbery is not a good place from which to criticize the attitudes of others.

MM, that’s a terrific article. I’ve worked in finance, or finance adjacent all my life. I’m also pretty interested in the history of finance. I can’t begin to articulate the disillusionment I felt after the crisis of 2008. I’m not sure that sending a few high-level bankers to prison would have helped; maybe that would have scared other high-level bankers straight, maybe it wouldn’t. But I cannot believe that no regulation resulted. That’s highly abnormal. I see young people continue to pour into jobs that are basically gambling with no downside. If you happen to do well, you get a multi-million dollar bonus. If you lose, you have to make ends meet on your $300k salary that year. It’s like nothing ever happened. Meanwhile, other young people fight for the right to work fulltime in the fast food industry, and the middle class pays a higher effective tax rate than the super-rich. Something is going to give way.

I worked my entire career at the VA (prosthetic service). Over those twenty four years, I saw budgets and staffing being slowly but steadily whittled away.

Now, there’s a hue and a cry about how ineffective the VA system is. Maybe we should privatize it! Who, I wonder, would benefit from this?

Back when healthcare reform was being discussed, the so-called ‘public option’ was the first idea discarded. Reform turned into a full-employment act for insurance companies. Who, I wonder, would benefit from this?

A subtle pattern begins to emerge.

Regarding misogynoir, it reminds me of a scathing poem by Essex Hemphill. It ends with the line (IIRC), “we are about loving each other* the way America is about loving us.”

I think a lot of conservatives in Minnesota, other than the stereotypical religious righties and super rich people are of the temporarily embarrassed millionaire variety. People truly think that if enough taxes are cut and enough unions are busted they’ll be able to bootstrap themselves into a 7 figure salary.

It’s so baffling because these same people tend to agree that things have gotten worse for the middle class recently. Yet they can’t connect the dots and realize that the middle class was better off when taxes were higher and unions were stronger. Somewhere in the back of their minds they must know that supply side economics has failed, but they’re in denial and tell themselves that one more tax cut for the rich, one more deregulation will do the trick. I wonder what it will take to shake people out of it?

Also, Policy of Madness, could we please try not to generalize about rural folks?

Pretty much all of Alaska counts as rural, by a lot of standards. Saying that rural folks are mostly white feels way too much like erasing Alaska Native cultures.

I’m really, really uncomfortable with that.

Our state already has an ugly little bit of history, where different native groups were put in camps, not allowed to speak their languages, and were taught in a manner specifically attempting to make them as ‘white’ as possible.

Now, folks are scrambling to record as many conversations as possible, and trying to preserve some of he more hard hit cultures.

So, yeah, please no ‘Rural Folks be white rednecks who hate city folk ’cause hipsters look down on them’

Didn’t mean to jump on you, but over-generalizations make me feel a tad nervous.

Policy of Madness — I was speaking mainly of my uncle, his family, and the neighbors. Other than the house immediately nextdoor — a NYC guy who summer’s up there, I don’t think any of them have been to anything close to a city in years. I know my uncle won’t even come down here anymore — “it’s too dangerous” (Bull. Fucking. Shit. When you have goddamned black bears wandering around like they own the place, and coyotes making regular appearances, you have no standing to call New Haven’s ‘burbs dangerous)

So yeah, any perception he’s got of we city folk is based on me and the rest of the family, and TV. (And I take no issue with getting dirty, finding snakes in rock piles, cow manure, getting my arm sucked into an overly friendly cow’s mouth, not real keen on the spiders, or the whole YOU HAVE BEARS!! But no, I don’t look down my nose at them. Or at least I didn’t before last summer’s “this conversion is clearly going nowhere, I’m going upstairs” and then having the insults get WORSE once I wasn’t replying at all)

Pecunium — yes, THAT day. And I apologize again for melting down in your inbox, I don’t take well to being trapped with grown men screaming insults at me long after I calmly walked away.

“If a precious woman cries sexual harrassment ya call Big Daddy to punish the bad man. Dontcha? Men stand up individually for themselves. Women run to the State and demand punishment.”

This one in particular confuses me. I’m perfectly happy to beat a man within an inch of his life for sexually harassing me, but I know the government *frowns* on that sort of thing. I would go to jail for assault, and all.

I assume a man would also go to jail for assault. But do men get a special free pass, where they can pound the shit out of their harassers without fear of reprisal? Because that would explain a lot.

@Argenti
“it’s too dangerous” (Bull. Fucking. Shit. When you have goddamned black bears wandering around like they own the place, and coyotes making regular appearances, you have no standing to call New Haven’s ‘burbs dangerous)”

Well, actually, black bears are very timid. In a face to face, 95% of the time (which happen because you spook the bear) its just posturing and the bear will back down. The only high risk situations are a mother with her cubs or if the bear has no escape route. Coyotes have been acting weird in the North East because they mixed with wolves, but typically, they don’t look for troubles with humans. Where I live now, they are not present and I really miss hearing them howling at night. Moose are the most dangerous critters, both the female with a calf, and the male in rut. In the country, pot growers and thieves are more of danger than the wildlife. I would think one of the unspoken reason for your uncle not going in town may be the traffic, which can be intimidating. That’s one of the reasons I avoid big cities like the plague.

“Saying that rural folks are mostly white feels way too much like erasing Alaska Native cultures.”

That definitely was not my intention. I meant that, if you take the US as a whole and split it into people who live within a metropolitan statistical area and those who do not, most rural people are white. Rural black people exist, and so do Native Americans, and every other group you can name, just not in equivalent numbers to white people. I’m sorry. I did not intend to erase any of them. I’ll try to be more careful next time.

@Argenti Aertheri

“I was speaking mainly of my uncle, his family, and the neighbors.”

I understand that that wasn’t meant to be a generalization, but can you see where it comes across as one? Maybe you have friends or acquaintances who talk about country folks as backwards hicks – they may not intend it to be a generalization either, but to a country hick it definitely seems that way. I don’t just mean on TV. I mean people talk to each other, face to face, and make fun of rural people.

I live in a mid-sized city and I hear it all the time. I have visited much larger cities, and it seems epidemic there (and, hilariously, mid-sized southern cities are on the target list for mockery, too). I am not a fan of the “hipster” thing, partially for this reason (and partially for other reasons).

It’s legit to criticize people from the country for their racism, but not legit to criticize them for drinking Budweiser and not whatever small-batch craft beer is The Thing Today.

I think Julie’s point was that the implications of that statement are that women rely on the legal/justice/emergency response system to solve conflicts, whereas manly men manfully take matters into their own man hands (i.e., vigilante justice). Women are weak and dependent and can’t handle house fires and street riots by themselves.

In MRA/Libertarian World, asking paid public servants to do their job makes you childish and emotionally needy, while impulsively lashing out is a sign of maturity and self-reliance.

Re: New Math – my daughter just finished kindergarten, and I have to admit I’m kind of smitten with the way math is being taught (in our state, at least). Pecunium is right, at this stage at least there’s a lot of Set Theory, but that’s perfect for little ones who are still trying to grasp the whole concept of addition and subtraction. I’ve also been impressed with how intuitively algebraic and geometric concepts are being introduced while they’re still mastering simple addition. I almost dropped my teeth during homework time when I realized that my five-year-old had just finished a math problem where she had solved for a variable.

Of course, this is definitely a YMMV situation. My daughter has an affinity for numbers and patterns anyway, she obviously lucked into a good teacher, and the curriculum in our area seems to be pretty good. It also definitely works in her favor that she’s starting her school career with New Math. I can imagine how confusing it must be to be a fourth or fifth grader taught under the old system and to suddenly – hey, presto! – have to switch to a new, weird concept.

I think New Math was dead in Canada by the time I went through school. There was a lot of Base 12 / Base 8 stuff in the back of the textbooks which we worked around and never dealt with. I picked up just enough to realize how useful that could be with, say, time or bytes.

Julie: I assume a man would also go to jail for assault. But do men get a special free pass, where they can pound the shit out of their harassers without fear of reprisal? Because that would explain a lot.

If the “harasser” is male, they most certainly do; all to many occasions.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.